Erinnerung zwischen Alltagsgeschichte und Großer Erzählung
10.1515/9783110717679.Abstract
The study examines ways of narrating transnationality by analyzing the novel Rubik’s Cube (2016) by Vratislav Maňak and its poetics of memory and historical “truth.” The main question is how the small story-telling of every-day life is intertwined with “big” history in the construction of national identities and/or the dissolution of national rituals and major narratives of memory culture. The novel focuses on the history of Pilsen in Western Bohemia. The American liberation in 1945 as well as the rebellion of Škoda workers in June 1953 are especially emphasized in the region’s collective memory, although these topics weren’t officially addressed before 1989. On the meta-historical level, truth can only be found in the way characters in the novel talk about the past (which reveals something about the present, rather than the past), whereas the truth about the past cannot ultimately be revealed by the characters trying so hard to find it.
